After the resignation of Carlos Mazón for his management of the Dana, the PP is experiencing a difficult situation déjà vu. Once again, as in 2023, the Valencian Community acts as a forerunner of the new generation of agreements with Vox. At the risk of repeating the script.
Two years ago, after the regional elections in May, Mazón was the first PP baron to make an agreement with the far right. This agreement was interpreted as a surrender to Vox, whom he allowed to join his government and whose postulates he assumed. As a result of this alliance, Mazón repealed the Valencian Democratic Memory Law and replaced it with a so-called law of concord in which Francoism was not condemned. He also agreed to rename sexist violence with the ultra-euphemism of “domestic violence.” This understanding between Mazón’s PP and Vox gave the PSOE arguments to link Alberto Núñez Feijóo with the far right in the general election campaign of July 2023, brought forward after those of the regional elections, and the PP leader remained at the gates of La Moncloa.
Now, in a sort of second part of the 2023 political cycle, the Valencian Community once again inaugurates, with the possible alliance with the far right, a race for electoral appointments in several communities governed by the PP; a race that, moreover, no one can rule out ending with the general elections. More and more PP leaders believe this after the break between Junts and Pedro Sánchez’s government, even if the PSOE leader insists that his mandate will expire until 2027.
These echoes of 2023 have raised the alarm in the PP. The negotiations already started with Vox to elect Mazón’s replacement at the helm of the Generalitat Valenciana have put popular presidents on alert, who fear the negative impact on their own electoral events in the coming months.
In the territories governed by the PP they privately express their concern, whether or not there is an agreement in the Valencian Community and elections are held. “I am putting candles to all the saints so that they close a deal soon”, says ironically a baron, who prefers “a rapid closure of the negotiation” so that the PP can close the unfortunate Valencian chapter as soon as possible, which has repercussions on the PP brand.
“I hope that the government of the Generalitat Valenciana gets to work on the recovery as soon as possible,” said the president of Andalusia, Juan Manuel Moreno, this Saturday upon his arrival at the Andalusian PP congress in Seville, before veiledly urging Vox to accept a deal. “Once Mr. Mazón accepts his resignation and leaves,” Moreno noted, “I think Valencians want them to stop playing politics and get to work.” The Andalusian leader was re-elected yesterday with 99.5% of the votes.
In Seville, the Andalusian PP avoided references to the Valencian crisis, despite the resignation of president passed over in the environment. The popular Andalusians have opted for a congress without the presence of the other barons, who usually participate as guests in the congresses of their party colleagues, to avoid distortions with national politics. Only the president of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, was seen in Seville, after Madrid’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso canceled her presence at the last moment due to a slight indisposition.
“What happened in Valencia has become a national issue, and national politics always influences us in our elections,” admits a worried PP president.
This wasn’t what was planned. Mazón’s resignation changed Génova’s plans. Feijóo’s leadership had organised, in coordination with its barons, a sequence of elections in their fiefdoms as “post-PSOE blows”, starting with the elections in Extremadura on 21 December, continuing with Castilla y León on 15 March and concluding in June with the elections in Andalusia. But the resignation of president Valencian and the negotiation with Vox to replace him now appear on the scene as an obstacle to that plan, with unpredictable consequences.
In other popular territories, a bad agreement with Vox is more feared than the possibility of a repeat of the Valencian elections. “It’s worse that we make a lot of concessions to Abascal, it would be better for the PP to get up and go to the polls, even if it loses power there,” says a territorial leader. In Feijóo’s direction, it is defended that the important thing is that the PP is perceived as a “pioneer” for Vox and that it directs consensus towards issues that worry Valencians, such as reconstruction after the dana or housing, instead of what Abascal has put on the table: the rejection of the European green pact and the reception of migrant minors.
But the weakness of the PP in the Valencian Community worries his party colleagues. “Mazón already humiliated himself enough when he approved his latest budgets with Vox,” recalls another territorial leader referring to the 2025 accounts, which Mazón created by taking on much of the rhetoric of the ultras. He defended, in almost the same words, the “end of the European Green Deal” and announced his refusal to accept the reception of a single unaccompanied foreign minor in the Valencian Community. “Now Vox will try to pull our pants down again, and the risk is that they will try to drag us in, and then, despite everything, we will also go to elections in the Valencian Community,” they warn in the PP.
The first to take the risk of the Valencian negotiation is the president of Extremadura and candidate for re-election, María Guardiola, who will be examined first on December 21st. PP and Vox’s talks in Valencia coincide with their pre-campaign. The woman from Extremadura aspires to maintain government in a community where the PSOE has dominated recent history, with 36 years in power against the PP’s five.
This implies a more moderate electorate in principle, where Guardiola is not interested in the PP’s image given to the far right, even if he governed with Vox until the ultras broke the government in the summer of 2024. “It is clear that if Vox invests the PP candidate in the Valencian Community, whatever the deal is, the PSOE will use it,” reasons another popular leader. “But you have to look at the details of the agreement, which is what can damage the elections in Extremadura,” he says. “Guardiola also goes to the polls with the argument that she was forced by a squeeze from the PSOE and Vox, which blocked the budgets, so she is not happy with Vox agreeing with the PP on its support for the Valencian investiture.”
Guardiola’s advantage, according to the PP, is that the PSOE goes to the polls very weakly because its candidate, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, is accused of the case of Pedro Sánchez’s brother.
After Guardiola, the next one to take risks is the president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, especially if Vox were to bring the Valencian PP to the polls. The elections, in this case, would fall on March 21st, immediately after the Castilian-Leonese ones, scheduled for the 15th, so both campaigns would overlap.
And finally, the impact of the Valencian shock wave could reach Andalusia, with elections in June in which Juan Manuel Moreno aspires to reconfirm an absolute majority that has put the breast cancer screening crisis and the rise of Vox at risk. Those around the Andalusian president believe however that, unlike the others, he benefits from an agreement of the Valencian PP with transfers, to use him as a negative example of what should not happen in Andalusia.
Moreno intends to replicate the campaign that gave him an absolute majority in 2022, in which he asked to concentrate the vote on his ballot so as not to have to depend on the ultras. “Change must continue,” the Andalusian president said on Saturday in Seville, calling for a “stable majority”, that is, without the need for Vox.
In the PP they are aware that the management of their autonomous pacts will be decisive, once again, for the future of the national leader of the PP. “The question is how Mazón’s resignation will affect Feijóo,” reflects a leader of an autonomous government, according to whom it is still too early to know, waiting to know to what extent the political scenario of 2023 will be redesigned or not.
